Grand Challenges Lecture Series - 1st March


Posted on 14 February 2017

Professor Steve Hinchliffe - Pathological Lives: On the cosmopolitics of losing self-assurance

01 March 2017 | 1.00 - 2.00pm | Keele Hall - The Salvin Room

The Grand Challenges lecture series is delighted to welcome its next speaker to Keele University, Professor Steve Hinchcliffe.

The Institute of Liberal Arts and Sciences (ILAS) Grand Challenges Lecture series explores complex questions which confront local, national, regional and global communities. These grand challenges will require creative and innovative interdisciplinary thinking and collaboration to suggest and predict possible resolutions.

About the lecture

We live in resurgent microbial times. From the ‘volatile world of influenza viruses’ (WHO, 2015) to the circulation of antimicrobial genes across populations of bacteria, this is a bio-insecure world. It is a world where the smallest of organisms threatens the edifices of modern life (medicine, food production, infrastructures, mobility, freedoms, security and so on).

In this talk I refer to two responses. First, there is the establishment of a common and singular good life, or One Health. Here, pathological lives are constructed as an outside threat to the norms of health and good life. Second, and in contrast, there is a cosmopolitics, wherein norms are questioned rather than re-established. Here, emergent microbes and circulating resistant genes are not so much a threat to good life as a ‘passing fright that scares self-assurance’ (Stengers 2005).
They can help to generate a situation with power to make us think. In this second, cosmopolitical approach, pathological lives are not so much the problem, but are part of the solution. They require us to pursue a different common world, a common sensing that is open to the bewildering variety of what it means to be both in touch with and touched by ‘reality’ (Stengers 2009: 38).

About Professor Steve Hinchcliffe

Professor Hinchliffe FAcSS is Professor of Human Geography at the College of Life and Environmental Sciences at the University of Exeter. He has a wide range of research interests, with publications on issues ranging from risk and food, to biosecurity, human-nonhuman relations and nature conservation.

Refreshments will be available in the Great Hall, adjacent to the Salvin Room from 12.30pm onwards.

This lecture is free and all are welcome to attend.